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Word Power
There used to be - perhaps still is - a column in the Readers Digest called Increase your Word Power. You'd read it in Dental waiting rooms, wishing you weren't there. The cold plastic seats bit into the back of your legs. The wait always seemed interminable. You'd worked through all the cartoons, through such comforting articles as I am John's tooth, to the short, schoolish, feature that tested your vocabulary and threatened to expand it. You couldn't help feeling that the one word you needed in the circumstances was simple enough. No. But once in the dentist's chair, you lay, meek as a lamb, wordless; only body language shouting your increasing uncertainty.
To a point, the Digest was right. Individual words are potent. They carry meaning, represent reality. They are never simple: even single words, as the Word Power exercise implied, offer divers possibilities. Words can change your life. Open doors. Make things happen. Ali Baba knew that. So did Gandalf.
Words have physical effect. Spoken, written, or read, they offer your body, to a greater or lesser degree, the experience described - or, at least, the experience according to your interpretation of the given text. Meaning is not unchanging. Never exact. Words are complex, slippery tools in the transactional analysis of daily discourse we call life.
How much more complex, then, than the single word is narrative, is story?
Jerome Bruner, Harvard Professor, says
'We live by stories, and
they're what give sense to our lives... we are a species whose main
purpose is to tell each other about the expected and the surprises
that upset the expected, and we do that in the stories we tell... we
are intersubjective... I know your intentions and you know mine.. it
is in this deep sense that no man is an island.. your very self depends
on this... in a culture, life is made possible by friends and close
others, and not just by abstract forces .'
I had not read Stories Matter: the role of Narrative in Medical Ethics (Rita Charron and Martha Montello (editors) published by Routledge, 2002) before today, but Bruner's comments, quoted from the opening chapter, might have been a template for the The Blue Moon Book.
In this story, recovering from head injury and ensuing loss of language and memory, the protagonist, Jess, desperately lacks the sense of authority, of authorship we all seek in our lives. ' Tethered to the present, lacking a coherent past, how could she hope to breathe again, complete? How can she trust the mirrored view, the single proof she'd held to through the silence?' Jess's recovery is told, at least initially, through the stories and reflections of those around her, her life, her self, 'made possible by friends and close others .'
Of course, Jess is fictional. What happens on the page is imagined truth, but no less real for that. Since the book was published, folk have gone out of their way to write, phone, stop me in the street, in the hospital, in the supermarket, to tell me how Jess's plight affected them. Stories matter .
I have been greatly cheered by the recent evolution of the Narrative in Medicine movement. A broad field, this does not just apply to novels, plays or poems on medical subjects (Try Nell Dunn's Cancer Tales, though. The play will have you in floods of tears, as I was, reading it.) Patients' own stories and how they interact with doctors' narratives is the hugely important foundation. Then there is the effect of Literary Theory on Medicine, the fertile myriad interactions with other disciplines such as Ethics, Philosophy, Politics, Sociology, Anthropology...
Medicine does not exist in a vacuum. It is, and always has been a vibrant conversation, informed by both the Sciences and the Arts. By life. Stories matter. Words - we can't deny it - words have power.
Stories Matter: The Role of Narrative in Medical Ethics Rita Charon and Martha Montello (editors) ROUTLEDGE 2002
Anne MacLeod's latest novel The Blue Moon Book is published by Luath (PBK £9.99). Why don't you also try The Strange Case of Robert Louis Stevenson, by Richard Woodhead (HBK £16.99).
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